Twitter, if I mention it on my Facebook page, people either comment with I hate it, I love it or ask how the heck do you use it. Personally, I love the continuous information feed on it but find the spam posts to be just overwhelming. I love the quirky people who post funny stuff but dislike that everyone seems to be like a corner drug dealer, they always have something to push.

Recently I overhead someone say that Twitter was dead, as in not good for leads. This really got me thinking about how I use twitter and where I needed to tweak things. I do use Twitter as part of my marketing plan, and find that if you KISS, or Keep it Simple, you can use it for your benefit.

After analyzing the reason I want/need to use twitter, I came up with three simple tips to maximize the time you spend on twitter. I hope you find this useful!

Go through the list of every vendor you use, from cell phones to your electric company. Also any products you buy regularly, even down to things like the brand of almond milk you buy. Then follow each company. Why? Because IF something goes wrong, many companies are now using Twitter as a customer service portal. Another tip, check their regular profile for a customer service profile. Many times they will put an @HelpCompanyName handle in their about for direct contact with issues. This has saved my backside more than once when I was in the queue for their tech support dept. I always get fast results using this method. When you do this, also use lists to keep this organized.

Decide what you want to do with your twitter. Do you want it just for show, aka credibility, or do you really want to use it as a marketing tool? If you just want to use it for street cred, hire someone to get your numbers up. You can do this via Fiverr, hiring your cousin Lisa Sue or just DIY. What you do is find five people you admire and follow their followers, and keep doing this. Trust me, it works. Just don't do this haphazardly, you can't add thousands per day and be sure to keep a good balance of following vs followers. Be sure and refer to the Twitter TOS and stick to lower numbers. This would be the quantity over quality thing though, so just know that this is not good for building a true audience.

To build a true audience, hone in on those who matter. Twitter is filled with chit chat, and shit chat. Yes I said it. There are so many people on there just killing time. With anything online, it's hard to tell if you are genuinely building a relationship or just someones free time killer. How do you avoid this? Be genuine yourself. This gets you far on twitter. Retweet things that move, motivate and inspire you. Respond to those who peak your interest, talk to new people, ask questions and be helpful with answers. Offer your expert advice to those who need it. Oh and twitter trappin, AKA engaging someone just to get your twitter handle retweeted is kind of lame and bad for your twitter Karma. Be strategic in all that you do on twitter, and most often, be yourself. If you hang out where your target audience hangs out, you can engage and get the business leads you've been looking for.

So what about you.......Do you have any Twitter questions? Are you using it at the moment as part of your marketing plan or just using your profile to build street cred?